I recently attended Tableau's open house in Austin to see what the buzz about this data visualization company, opening a new office in Austin, was all about. Tableau's CEO and co-founder Chris Chabot gave an amazing demo on FAA flight delays slicing and dicing data and plotting visual graphs on maps of the US. Wow, it looked so simple and fast, slicing millions of rows of records in seconds! I thought I would give it a try to look at some US Census data on bicycle commuting. I just wanted to visualize some simple data and be able to quickly answer some questions like, what states and cities have the highest ridership. I quickly searched the net and found a small data set of US census cycling data from the League of American Bicyclists, 2010 Bike Commuting Data released blog entry.
For starters, I downloaded the Pro version trial of the product and did some initial work to get familiar it. Following Tabluea's quickstart tutorials was a great introduction. Tableau is definitely a different way of thinking with the ability to categorize and drill down data in a single graph which might take several charts in a tool like Excel. After learning how to create visualizations with the Pro version, I quickly realized I needed the Public version of the product to publish my visualizations.
My first attempt to connect with Tableau's Public desktop product was on my MacBook's virtual machine (VMWare Fusion 3) running Window 7. For some reason I kept getting HTTP 302 error from the Public tools and thus could not save my workbook. A quick install on a stand-alone Windows 7 install and I was up and running quickly.
The first visualization demonstrates total number of riders by State and City.
1. The direct link to the graph on Tableau Public is here. Notice that on this view you can drill down into the data, save data, and view the raw data.
2. The embedded view is below. You will notice that the embedded chart here is bit truncated due to the fixed column with of the Google blogger template I am using. However, given a more flexible layout it is a simple operation to re-size the visualizations on your blog or dashboard.
The second graph simply sorts out ridership by city and sizes the shapes according to percentage of riders.
1. The link to Tableau Public: Percentage of Riders By City
2. The embedded view is here. Again as above, the presentation is not quite perfect due to the limited column width.
Installation
For starters, I downloaded the Pro version trial of the product and did some initial work to get familiar it. Following Tabluea's quickstart tutorials was a great introduction. Tableau is definitely a different way of thinking with the ability to categorize and drill down data in a single graph which might take several charts in a tool like Excel. After learning how to create visualizations with the Pro version, I quickly realized I needed the Public version of the product to publish my visualizations.
My first attempt to connect with Tableau's Public desktop product was on my MacBook's virtual machine (VMWare Fusion 3) running Window 7. For some reason I kept getting HTTP 302 error from the Public tools and thus could not save my workbook. A quick install on a stand-alone Windows 7 install and I was up and running quickly.
Publishing
Saving your data on Tableau's Public service is seamless. You wouldn't want to store your confidential data on public servers, but that's what the Pro product is for. My Bike Commuting visualization exercise is saved to my 2010 Bike Commuting Data workbook. Note that you can only view/download my workbook if you have Tableau Public installed on your Windows machine. While you can use your Mac Book to publish your Tableau workbooks, the only way to create visualizations is with the Windows Desktop installation. (The guys at Tableau assured me there's a Mac port on the way).The Visualizations
Tableau allows you to create links to your visualizations from a web link or embed live graphs right in your blog or other social media outlets (much like YouTube). What's cool is that your visualizations are live, meaning that as you update your workbooks your visualizations will keep up to date for your data consumers.The first visualization demonstrates total number of riders by State and City.
1. The direct link to the graph on Tableau Public is here. Notice that on this view you can drill down into the data, save data, and view the raw data.
2. The embedded view is below. You will notice that the embedded chart here is bit truncated due to the fixed column with of the Google blogger template I am using. However, given a more flexible layout it is a simple operation to re-size the visualizations on your blog or dashboard.
1. The link to Tableau Public: Percentage of Riders By City
2. The embedded view is here. Again as above, the presentation is not quite perfect due to the limited column width.
After spending just a few hours with Tableua, I can see I am barely scratching the surface the visualization stories I could tell. There is a very vibrant and active community built around the product with forums and ability to download visualizations in the public gallery.
1 comment:
Hey Tim - Thanks for the heads up on Tableau. We have great software and a great platform but our reporting features are lacking. Our CEO has been talking about buying a tool since the developers production schedule is packed until next year. Tableau seems like exactly the solution we need! - Dan
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